A wealth of information, a poverty of attention

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Where it comes from

The line is from Herbert A. Simon, in a 1971 essay called "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" (published in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press). It's the sentence usually credited as the origin of the phrase "the attention economy."

Simon (1916–2001) is worth knowing, because the quote is doing real intellectual work, not just sounding clever. He was a genuine polymath: he won the Nobel Prize in Economics (1978) for the idea of bounded rationality — that people don't optimize perfectly, they make do with limited time, info, and brainpower — and the Turing Award (1975) for foundational work in artificial intelligence. So when he talks about information and attention, he's talking as both an economist and a cognitive scientist. This sentence is him applying the logic of economics to your own head.

What it actually means (the plain version)

Economics is, at heart, the study of scarcity — of things there isn't enough of. You only ever have to manage, budget, or fight over something that's in short supply. Nobody rations air.

Simon's move is to point out a flip:

Information used to be the scarce thing. For most of history it was hard to get — books were expensive, news was slow, expertise was locked up in a few heads. If you had information, you had an advantage.
Now information is the abundant thing. It's effectively infinite and mostly free — the internet, feeds, articles, videos, notifications, this very file. There is far more of it than anyone could ever read.
So information stopped being the bottleneck. When something becomes overwhelmingly abundant, it stops being valuable in itself. The valuable, scarce thing becomes whatever that abundant thing eats up.
What information eats up is your attention. Every article, tweet, or notification costs you a slice of your focus to take in. And your attention is hard-capped — you've only got so many waking hours and so much mental bandwidth in a day.

Put those together and you get the sentence: a wealth (flood) of information automatically creates a poverty (shortage) of attention — because the flood drains the limited pool. The more there is to read, the less of your finite focus is left for any single thing.

And the kicker — "a need to allocate that attention efficiently" — is the practical consequence: since attention is now the scarce resource, the real skill is no longer finding information, it's choosing what to ignore.

A way to picture it

Think of your attention as a small, fixed amount of money, and every piece of information as something in a shop you can "buy" by paying attention to it.

When there were three shops in town, your budget was plenty. You could afford to look at everything.
Now there are infinite shops, all open 24/7, all free to walk into. Your budget didn't grow — it's still the same small wallet.
The shelves being infinitely full doesn't make you richer. It makes your wallet feel poorer, because now it has to be spread across an impossible number of things.

The abundance on the shelves (information) is exactly what bankrupts the wallet (attention). That's the whole quote.

Why it matters now

Simon wrote this in 1971, before the internet existed — which is the impressive part. He predicted the central problem of the modern web decades early:

Attention is the product being sold. Social media, news sites, and streaming services are mostly free to you because you aren't the customer — your attention is the inventory they sell to advertisers. The "attention economy" he named is now a literal, multi-billion-dollar industry.
"Information overload" is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is that supply (information) outran the one thing that can't scale — your capacity to attend to it.
Curation beats accumulation. Saving 400 articles "to read later," following 50 newsletters, having 90 browser tabs open — none of that helps, because the constraint was never access. The constraint is attention. The win is in subtracting.